This is not a great movie. It’s altogether
too slick and American with a predictable development: rebellious boys against
oppressive society. The actual courage and deep love of swing shown by the
historical kids in Nazi Germany of the 1930’s is in this film cute and
superficial when it should have been deeply moving. The figures are pure cliché, the politics
slicked over and Americanized (“of course he wasn’t a communist!” when in
reality he, the resistant and arrested father, probably was).

It was made the same year as Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh and Robert Sean Leonard
together there too!), which seems odd.

The cast, in spite of everything is good and they do what they can with
inferior material. It’s fun to see
Christian Bale so young (though he was even younger in Branagh’s Henry V) – hints of Batman are already
visible. But it’s a scandal that Branagh
isn’t credited?!?! How could that have happened?

The dancing is great and it was very interesting to get a new angle on
the Nazi suppression of black music that I hadn’t known about, in spite of my
life-long interest in WWII.

The bad parts and the good parts weigh about equally here, therefore 2 ½
* out of 5.